Welcome to my author website. I am posting here some of my previously published writing, and also links to more recent and current published essays and short stories. And, if that’s not enough, you can also follow me on Twitter!

One day I looked around my office and there were stacks of paper copies of essays I had published. Yes, stacks. Besides constituting a fire hazard, it was also beginning to look like the lair of a paper hoarder. Since it seems unlikely that my “papers, notebooks, and ephemera” will be acquired for a vast sum of money any time soon by a prestigious university, like Jonathan Lethem’s recently were, I decided to take matters into my own hands. I am creating, here on my website, my own archive! I will post as many essays as I have published that I can find, and that I still deem worthy of sharing, going as far back as the 1980s, when I published my very first one in The Los Angeles Times. Read on!

Every writer I know keeps notebooks (whether “real” notebooks or virtual) where they write or record things other (usually more well-known) writers have said that strike them as helpful, or just plain lovely. These notebooks are usually also the repository for other random thoughts the writer might have: story ideas, books they want to read, authors they want to check out – basically anything that might pertain to their writing life.

Going back and looking through these notebooks is a favorite activity of mine. I count it as “real work,” which means that when I go through these notebooks I am actually finding all sorts of potential “jumping-off points” for my own work. This is very helpful when I am casting about for what to work on next, or when I need a break from what I am working on.

I often share quotes from other writers on Twitter, but many of the authors I like best do not share their observations in 140 characters or less. With that in mind, I offer some of my favorite quotes from random notebooks – quotes that I liked so much, I felt compelled to find a pen and notebook to record them. (Seems like a somewhat arcane task, nevertheless…) Continue reading →

(This is a short excerpt from my just-completed memoir The Queen of Everything. I loved writing it, but now the hard part – finding an agent and/or publisher!)

No one teaches you how to be a sister. There are entire shelves of books and magazines devoted to teaching you how to be a wife and mother. But being a sister is pretty much on-the-job training with no role models or how-to magazines. Just Mom saying, as she runs out the door to catch the bus to her waitress job, “I only ask one thing. Try not to kill each other.”

But, like every other time in my life when I’ve had no clue how to “be” (which has been a lot) I got much of my guidance from books.

I guess this could be seen as a sort of DIY approach to life, a life learned from books. Jo March and Laura Ingalls Wilder were my early mentors, with the sisters in Jane Austen’s novels nudging them aside later, until Seventeen and Tiger Beat took over my teenage brain and turned me into a narcissistic little bitch who would have traded all five sisters for the complete set of Bonne Bell Basics. Continue reading →